For me AirBnb has the dubious distinction of being the only online service I'm banned from, and I have no idea why. I barely used it and the few times I did the hosts were happy. One day I tried to log in and the app wouldn't work properly. I filed a support ticket and they told me they weren't going to tell me anything and there was no appeals process either. And that was that. My guess is I got IP clustered with another person whose account was legit banned, but really, who knows. What's the point of the ID verification process if they act like a free webmail operation anyway?

With booking.com and hotels, you're paying about the same but avoid the BS that comes with Airbnb. It's a much more reliable and predictable experience. The idea of people requiring Airbnb for anything more important than a vacation rental is horrifying.

The hotel I’m staying at right now is dirty as fuck.

The valve for the shower does not operate properly, the water pressure is extremely low and it barely gets above 90F. Other rooms in the same hotel have a different valve and the showers work fine.

“We will send a maintenance person right away” it’s been a week.

There is old food under and behind my bed.

They empty trash in the hall once a week, it fills up in two days.

They advertise laundry but the driers are all out of order. Apparently the only reason is the change collection bucket is full, the owner doesn’t trust anyone but himself to empty it, but he’s two states away.

I can hear everything through all the walls around me. I can hear people fart.

This hotel has 4.5 stars with >2000 reviews.

I booked a cabin via VRBO for a few nights as a celebration. It was somewhat remote, but the architecture was neat, and it was a decent deal for my budget. There was some weird cotton-like stuff and...snapping?...in one of the walls that was a bit off-putting, but nothing seemed serious.

Then, night came.

I awoke in my bedroom to something moving. Bleary eyed, I turned on the bedside light and saw something flitting almost silently in the darkness. It seemed like a large insect perhaps to my blurred vision. But whether it was the size or the weird sounds, it eventually clicked: it was a bat trapped in the high-ceiling bedroom.

So, after swiftly getting out of the room, doing some hasty research, and calling animal control, I learned two things. First, bat encounters in the area have a standing policy to IMMEDIATELY see the nearest emergency room to receive a rabies vaccination. It turns out bat bites can be super-tiny and difficult to detect, and they are carriers.

Second, I struggled to convince the limited support channels at VRBO that there was a freaking bat in their property. There was no real emergency line for support I could locate at the time, and I really hope that the information I left would somehow be used to prevent someone else using said property from, ya know, potentially contracting rabies.

To this day, I find myself more wary of property encounters. I don't think I ever got a refund for that debacle, but admittedly I may have been a bit more focused on my mortality.

Not really. When was the last time you stayed at a non-chain 2-star hotel in Asia?

Hotel chains care because they care about their brand. Not that's a result of being a chain, not of being a hotel.